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Ed McCurdy

Ed McCurdy

Ed McCurdy (January 11, 1919 - March 23, 2000) was a folk singer, songwriter, and television actor. He is probably best known for his widely-covered anti-war classic, "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream". Born to a farming family in Willow Hill, Pennsylvania, McCurdy left home at 18 to pursue a singing career. He recorded several albums in the 1950s and 60s, and performed several times at the legendary Newport Folk Festival, but was eventually outshadowed by a younger generation of singers. He moved to Nova Scotia and had a second career as a character actor on Canadian television.

External links

- [http://users2.ev1.net/~smyth/linernotes/personel/McCurdyEd.htm Biographical information and obituary]
- [http://www.arlo.net/lyrics/strangest-dream.shtml Lyrics for "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream"] McCurdy, Ed McCurdy, Ed McCurdy, Ed McCurdy, Ed

January 11

January 11 is the 11th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 354 days remaining (355 in leap years).

Events

- 532 - Nika riots in Constantinople.
- 1158 - Vladislav II becomes King of Bohemia.
- 1569 - First recorded lottery in England.
- 1571 - Austrian nobility is granted freedom of religion.
- 1693 - Eruption of Mt. Etna.
- 1759 - In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the first American life insurance company is incorporated.
- 1787 - William Herschel discovers Titania and Oberon, two moons of Uranus.
- 1805 - Michigan Territory is created.
- 1861 - Alabama secedes from the United States.
- 1863 - American Civil War: Battle of Arkansas Post - General John McClernand and Admiral David Porter capture the Arkansas River for the Union.
- 1867 - Benito Juárez becomes Mexican president again.
- 1879 - Anglo-Zulu War begins.
- 1880 - Total solar eclipse blackens the sky of San Francisco one day after the funeral of Emperor Norton.
- 1908 - Grand Canyon National Monument is created.
- 1919 - Romania annexes Transylvania.
- 1922 - First use of insulin to treat diabetes in a human patient.
- 1923 - Troops from France and Belgium occupy the Ruhr area to force Germany to pay its reparation payments.
- 1935 - Amelia Earhart is the first woman to fly solo from Hawaii to California.
- 1938 - Frances Moulton is the first woman to become president of a US national bank.
- 1942 - Japan declares war on the Netherlands and invades the Netherlands East Indies.
- The Japanese capture Kuala Lumpur.
- 1943 - The United States and United Kingdom give up territorial rights in China.
- 1946 - Enver Hoxha declares the People's Republic of Albania with himself as dictator.
- Porfirio Barba-Jacob's ashes go back to Colombia.
- 1949 - First recorded case of snowfall in Los Angeles, California.
- 1957 - The African Convention is founded in Dakar.
- 1962 - Eruption of the Huascaran volcano in Peru; 4,000 deaths.
- 1963 - The Whisky A Go-Go night club in Los Angeles, the first disco in the USA, is opened.
- 1964 - United States Surgeon General Luther Leonidas Terry reports smoking may be hazardous to health. First such statement from US government.
- 1972 - East Pakistan becomes Bangladesh.
- 1973 - Beginning of the Watergate burglars trial.
- 1974 - The world's first surviving set of sextuplets are born to Susan Rosenkowitz in Cape Town, South Africa.
- 1980 - Nigel Short, 14, is the youngest chess player to be awarded the degree of International Master.
- 1982 - A cold snap sends temperatures to record lows in dozens of cities throughout the Midwestern United States.
- 1990 - 300,000 march in favor of Lithuanian independence.
- 1991 - Ric Flair defeats Sting to become the first WCW Champion.
- 1992 - Paul Simon is the first major artist to tour South Africa after the end of the cultural boycott.
- 1994 - Irish Government announces the end of a 15-year broadcasting ban on the IRA and its political arm Sinn Fein
- 1996 - Haiti becomes a member of the Berne Convention copyright treaty.
- 1998 - Sidi-Hamed massacre in Algeria; over 100 people killed.
- 2001 - The Federal Trade Commission approved the merger of AOL and Time Warner to form AOL Time Warner.

Births

1322 to 1899

- 1322 - Emperor Komyo of Japan (d. 1380)
- 1359 - Emperor Go-En'yu of Japan (d. 1393)
- 1503 - Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, Italian artist (d. 1540)
- 1591 - Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex, English Civil War general (d. 1646)
- 1630 - John Rogers, American President of Harvard (b. 1684)
- 1671 - François-Marie, 1st duc de Broglie, French military leader (d. 1745)
- 1757 - Samuel Bentham, English mechanical engineer (d. 1831)
- 1757 - Alexander Hamilton, first United States Secretary of the Treasury (d. 1804)
- 1800 - Nat Turner, American slave (d. 1831)
- 1807 - Ezra Cornell, American businessman and university founder (d. 1874)
- 1815 - John A. Macdonald, first Prime Minister of Canada (d. 1891)
- 1856 - Christian Sinding, Norwegian composer (d. 1941)
- 1858 - Harry Gordon Selfridge, American retailer (d. 1947)
- 1859 - Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, British statesman, Viceroy of India (d. 1925)
- 1860 - Marie Bashkirtseff, Ukrainian artist (d. 1884)
- 1875 - Reinhold Glière, Russian composer (d. 1956)
- 1876 - Elmer Flick, American baseball player (d. 1971)
- 1885 - Alice Paul, American women's rights activist (d. 1977)
- 1887 - Aldo Leopold, American ecologist (d. 1948)

1900 to 1999

- 1902 - Maurice Duruflé, French composer (d. 1986)
- 1903 - Alan Paton, South African writer (d. 1988)
- 1906 - Albert Hofmann, Swiss chemist
- 1908 - Lionel Stander, American actor (d. 1994)
- 1911 - Zenko Suzuki, Prime Minister of Japan (d. 2004)
- 1921 - Juanita M. Kreps, former US Secretary of commerce
- 1923 - Carroll Shelby, American automobile designer
- 1924 - Roger Guillemin, French neuroendocrinologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- 1924 - Sam B. Hall, American politician (d. 1994)
- 1924 - Slim Harpo, American musician (d. 1970)
- 1925 - Grant Tinker, American television executive
- 1926 - Lev Demin, cosmonaut (d. 1998)
- 1930 - Rod Taylor, Australian actor
- 1934 - Jean Chrétien, twentieth Prime Minister of Canada
- 1938 - Arthur Scargill British labor leader
- 1941 - Gérson, Brazilian football player
- 1942 - Clarence Clemons, American musician (E Street Band)
- 1943 - Jim Hightower, American radio host and author
- 1944 - John Piper, American theologian
- 1944 - Shibu Soren, Indian politician
- 1946 - Naomi Judd, American singer
- 1952 - Ben Crenshaw, American golfer
- 1952 - Lee Ritenour, musician and composer
- 1956 - Robert Earl Keen, American singer
- 1957 - Bryan Robson, English footballer and manager
- 1958 - Vicki Peterson, American musician
- 1960 - Stanley Tucci, American actor
- 1961 - Jasper Fforde, British author
- 1962 - Susan Lindauer, American peace activist and accused spy
- 1963 - Dean Reynolds, English snooker player
- 1966 - Marc Acito, American novelist and humorist
- 1966 - Kelley Law, Canadian curler
- 1968 - Tom Dumont, American musician, Alison Lewis. British Writer and Humanitist
- 1971 - Mary J. Blige, American singer
- 1972 - Marc Blucas, American actor
- 1972 - Amanda Peet, American actress
- 1973 - Rahul Dravid, Indian cricketer
- 1977 - Shomari Buchanan, American football player
- 1978 - Emile Heskey, English footballer
- 1980 - Mike Williams, American football player

Deaths

314 to 1899

- 314 - St. Miltiades
- 705 - John VI
- 812 - Stauracius, Byzantine Emperor
- 1055 - Constantine IX Monomachos, Byzantine Emperor
- 1494 - Domenico Ghirlandaio, Italian artist (b. 1449)
- 1495 - Pedro González de Mendoza, Spanish cardinal and statesman (b. 1428)
- 1641 - Juan Martínez de Jáuregui y Aguilar, Spanish poet (b. 1583)
- 1696 - Charles Albanel, French missionary explorer in Canada (b. 1616)
- 1703 - Johann Georg Graevius, German classical scholar and critic (b. 1632)
- 1713 - Pierre Jurieu, French protestant leader (b. 1637)
- 1762 - Louis-François Roubiliac, French sculptor (b. 1695)
- 1763 - Caspar Abel, German theologian, historian, and poet (b. 1676)
- 1771 - Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d'Argens, French writer (b. 1704)
- 1791 - William Williams Pantycelyn, Welsh hymnist (b. 1717)
- 1801 - Domenico Cimarosa, Italian composer (b. 1749)
- 1843 - Francis Scott Key, American lawyer (b. 1779)
- 1882 - Theodor Schwann, German physiologist (b. 1810)

1900 to 1999

- 1901 - Vasily Kalinnikov, Russian composer (b. 1866)
- 1902 - Johnny Briggs, English cricketer (b. 1862)
- 1905 - Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter, Hasidic rabbi (b. 1847)
- 1923 - King Constantine I of Greece (b. 1868)
- 1928 - Thomas Hardy, English writer (b. 1840)
- 1941 - Emanuel Lasker, German chess player (b. 1868)
- 1958 - Edna Purviance, American actress (b. 1895)
- 1966 - Alberto Giacometti, Swiss sculptor (b. 1901)
- 1966 - Hannes Kolehmainen, Finnish runner (b. 1889)
- 1968 - Isidor Isaac Rabi, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1898) Alison Lewis British Crystal Healer
- 1970 - Richmal Crompton, British author (b. 1890)
- 1980 - Barbara Pym, English novelist (b. 1913)
- 1981 - Beulah Bondi, American actress (b. 1888)
- 1983 - Shri Ghanshyam Das Birla, Indian industrialist and educator (b. 1894)
- 1988 - Pappy Boyington, American aviator (b. 1912)
- 1991 - Carl David Anderson, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1905)
- 1998 - Klaus Tennstedt, German conductor (b. 1926)
- 1999 - Fabrizio de André, Italian singer (b. 1940)

2000 onwards

- 2000 - Ivan Combe, American inventor (b. 1911)
- 2000 - Bob Lemon, baseball player (b. 1920)
- 2001 - Sir Denys Lasdun, English architect (b. 1914)
- 2003 - Mickey Finn, English drummer (T. Rex)
- 2003 - Maurice Pialat, French actor and director (b. 1925)
- 2003 - Richard Simmons, American actor (b. 1913)
- 2005 - Spencer Dryden, American drummer (Jefferson Airplane) (b. 1938)
- 2005 - James Griffin, American musician (Bread) (b. 1943)
- 2005 - Miriam Hyde, Australian composer (b. 1913)

Holidays and observances

- Albania - Republic Day (1946)
- Japan - Kagami-Biraki (Rice Cakes Festival)
- Morocco - The Independence manifesto day
- Nepal - Unity Day
- Roman Empire - First day of Carmentalia in honor of Carmen
- Feast of the Baptism of Jesus

External links

- [http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/january/11 BBC: On This Day] ---- January 10 - January 12 - December 11 - February 11 — listing of all days ko:1월 11일 ms:11 Januari ja:1月11日 simple:January 11 th:11 มกราคม

March 23

March 23 is the 82nd day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (83rd in Leap years). There are 283 days remaining.

Events

- 752 - Stephen II becomes Pope.
- 1568 - Peace of Longjumeau ends the Second War of Religion in France. Again Catherine de Medici and Charles IX of France make substantial concessions to the Huguenots.
- 1708 - James Francis Edward Stuart lands at the Firth of Forth.
- 1775 - American Revolutionary War: Patrick Henry delivers his famous speech - "give me liberty or give me death" at St. John's Church in Richmond, Virginia.
- 1801 - Tsar Paul I of Russia is struck with a sword, then strangled, and finally trampled to death in his bedroom at St. Michael Palace.
- 1806 - After traveling through the Louisiana Purchase and reaching the Pacific Ocean, explorers Lewis and Clark and their "Corps of Discovery" begin their arduous journey home.
- 1839 - First recorded use of "OK" as an abbreviation for "oll korrect" in the Boston Morning Post.
- 1848 - The ship John Wickliffe arrives at Port Chalmers carrying the first Scottish settlers for Dunedin, New Zealand. Otago province is founded.
- 1857 - Elisha Otis's first elevator is installed at 488 Broadway, New York City.
- Death of Emile L'Angelier in Glasgow, Scotland -- possibly by the hand of Madeleine Smith.
- 1868 - The University of California is founded in Oakland, California when the Organic Act is signed into law.
- 1889 - Land run: President Benjamin Harrison opens Oklahoma to white settlement starting on April 22.
- The free Woolwich Ferry officially opens in east London.
- 1903 - The Wright Brothers apply for a patent on their invention of one of the first successful airplanes after much hard work.
- 1909 - Theodore Roosevelt leaves New York for a post-presidency safari in Africa. The trip is sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution and National Geographic Society.
- 1919 - In Milan, Italy, Benito Mussolini founds his Fascist political movement.
- 1931 - Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt embrace the gallows during the Indian struggle for independence. Their request to be shot by a firing squad is refused.
- 1933 - The Reichstag passes the Enabling Act, making Adolf Hitler dictator of Germany.
- 1935 - Signing of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of the Philippines
- 1940 - The Lahore Resolution (Qarardad-e-Pakistan or the then Qarardad-e-Lahore) is put forward at the Annual General Convention of the All India Muslim League.
- 1942 - World War II: In the Indian Ocean, Japanese forces capture the Andaman Islands.
- 1956 - Pakistan becomes the first Islamic republic in the world.
- 1962 - NS Savannah, the first nuclear-powered cargo-passenger ship, was launched as a showcase for Dwight D. Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace initiative.
- 1963 - In London, United Kingdom, Grethe & Jørgen Ingmann win the eighth Eurovision Song Contest for Denmark singing "Dansevise" (Dancing tune).
- 1965 - NASA launches Gemini 3, the United States' first two-man space flight (crew: Gus Grissom and John Young).
- 1978 - The first UNIFIL troops arrived in Lebanon for peacekeeping mission along the Blue Line.
- 1983 - Strategic Defense Initiative: President Ronald Reagan makes his initial proposal to develop technology to intercept enemy missiles.
- 1989 - Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announce cold fusion at the University of Utah.
- A 1,000-foot diameter Near-Earth asteroid misses the Earth by 400,000 miles.
- 1994 - At an election rally in Tijuana, Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio is assassinated by Mario Aburto Martínez.
- 1996 - Taiwan holds its first direct elections and chooses Lee Teng-hui as President
- 1999 - Gunmen assassinate Paraguay's Vice President Luis María Argaña.
- 2001 - The Russian Mir space station is disposed of, breaking up in the atmosphere before falling into the southern Pacific Ocean near Fiji.
- The World Wrestling Federation (WWF) (now World Wrestling Entertainment) purchases rival organization World Championship Wrestling (WCW) for an estimated $5 million.
- 2003 - In Nasiriyah, Iraq, 18 U.S. Marines are killed during the first major conflict of Operation Iraqi Freedom
- 2004 - Andhra Pradesh Federation of Trade Unions holds its first conference in Hyderabad, India.
- 2005 - The United States 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision, refuses to order the reinsertion of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube.

Births

1429 to 1899

- 1429 - Margaret of Anjou, queen of Henry VI of England (d. 1482)
- 1638 - Frederik Ruysch, Dutch physician and anatomist (d. 1731)
- 1699 - John Bartram, American botanist (d. 1777)
- 1723 - Agha Mohammad Khan Ghajar, King of Iran (d. 1771)
- 1749 - Pierre Simon de Laplace, French mathematician and astronomer (d. 1827)
- 1754 - Baron Jurij Vega, Slovenian mathematician, physicist, and artillery officer (d. 1802)
- 1769 - William Smith, English geologist and cartographer (d. 1839)
- 1823 - Schuyler Colfax, Vice President of the United States (d. 1885)
- 1831 - Eduard Schlagintweit, German writer (d. 1866)
- 1834 - Julius Reubke, German composer (d. 1858)
- 1858 - Ludwig Quidde, German pacifist, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (d. 1941)
- 1878 - Franz Schreker, Austrian composer (d. 1934)
- 1881 - Roger Martin du Gard, French writer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1958)
- 1881 - Hermann Staudinger, German chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1965)
- 1882 - Emmy Noether, German mathematician (d. 1935)
- 1887 - Juan Gris, Spanish artist (d. 1927)
- 1887 - Prince Felix Yussupov, Russian assassin of Rasputin (d. 1967)
- 1899 - Dora Gerson, German actress and singer (d. 1943)

1900 to 1999

- 1900 - Erich Fromm, German-born psychoanalyst (d. 1980)
- 1905 - Lale Andersen, German singer and cabaretist (d. 1972)
- 1905 - Joan Crawford, American actress (d. 1977)
- 1907 - Daniel Bovet, Swiss-born scientist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (d. 1992)
- 1910 - Akira Kurosawa, Japanese film director (d. 1998)
- 1912 - Betty Astell, British actress (d. 2005)
- 1912 - Wernher von Braun, German-born physicist and engineer (d. 1977)
- 1915 - Vasily Zaitsev, Russian World War II hero (d. 1991)
- 1929 - Sir Roger Bannister, British runner
- 1931 - Viktor Korchnoi, Russian chess player
- 1931 - Yevgenij Grishin, Russian speed skater (d. 2005)
- 1934 - Mark Rydell, American film and television director
- 1937 - Craig Breedlove, American land speed record holder
- 1938 - Maynard Jackson, American politician (d. 2003)
- 1942 - Walter Rodney, Guyanese historian and political figure (d. 1980)
- 1948 - David Olney, American musician
- 1949 - Ric Ocasek, American musician (The Cars)
- 1950 - Anthony De Longis, American actor
- 1951 - Corinne Clery, French actress
- 1952 - Kim Stanley Robinson, American author
- 1953 - Bo Diaz, Venezuelan baseball player (d. 1990)
- 1953 - Chaka Khan, American singer
- 1955 - Moses Malone, American basketball player
- 1956 - José Manuel Durão Barroso, Portuguese politician, president of the European Commission
- 1957 - Amanda Plummer, American actress
- 1960 - Nicol Stephen, Deputy First Minister of Scotland
- 1961 - Helmi Johannes, Indonesian television newscaster
- 1964 - Hope Davis, American actress
- 1965 - Richard Grieco, American actor and singer
- 1968 - Damon Albarn, English musician (Blur and Gorillaz)
- 1971 - Gail Porter, British television presenter
- 1971 - Karen McDougal, American model
- 1972 - Judith Godrèche, French actress and author
- 1973 - Jerzy Dudek, Polish footballer
- 1973 - Jason Kidd, American basketball player
- 1975 - Alydar, American racehorse (d. 1990)
- 1976 - Keri Russell, American actress
- 1978 - Nicholle Tom, American actress
- 1978 - Walter Samuel, Argentine football player
- 1979 - Mark Buehrle, baseball player
- 1979 - Chad Dittman, American president of the Indoor Football League
- 1979 - Misty Hyman, American swimmer
- 1983 - Jerome Thomas, English footballer

Deaths

1103 to 1899

- 1103 - Eudes I, Duke of Burgundy (b. 1058)
- 1369 - King Peter I of Castile (b. 1334)
- 1548 - Itagaki Nobukata, retainer of Takeda Shingen
- 1555 - Pope Julius III, (b. 1487)
- 1559 - Emperor Gelawdewos of Ethiopia (killed in battle) (b. 1522)
- 1596 - Henry Unton, English diplomat
- 1606 - Justus Lipsius, Flemish humanist (b. 1547)
- 1618 - James Hamilton, 1st Earl of Abercorn, Scottish politician
- 1653 - Johan van Galen, Dutch naval officer (b. 1604)
- 1680 - Nicolas Fouquet, French statesman (b. 1615)
- 1742 - Jean-Baptiste Dubos, French writer (b. 1670)
- 1747 - Claude Alexandre de Bonneval, French soldier (b. 1675)
- 1748 - Johann Gottfried Walther, German music theorist, organist, and composer (b. 1684)
- 1754 - Johann Jakob Wettstein, Swiss theologian (b. 1693)
- 1783 - Charles Caroll, American lawyer and delegate to the Continental Congress (b. 1723)
- 1801 - Tsar Paul of Russia (b. 1754)
- 1842 - Stendhal, French writer (b. 1783)

1900 to 1999

- 1927 - Paul César Helleu, French artist (b. 1859)
- 1931 - Bhagat Singh, Indian freedom fighter (b. 1907)
- 1955 - Artur da Silva Bernardes, President of Brazil (b. 1875)
- 1960 - Franklin Pierce Adams, American newspaper columnist (b. 1881)
- 1964 - Peter Lorre, Hungarian-born actor (b. 1904)
- 1965 - Mae Murray, American actress (b. 1889)
- 1970 - Del Lord, Canadian director (b. 1894)
- 1972 - Cristóbal Balenciaga, Spanish fashion designer (b. 1895)
- 1979 - Orlando Letelier, Chilean ambassador to the United States (b. 1932)
- 1992 - Friedrich Hayek, Austrian economist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1899)
- 1994 - Luis Donaldo Colosio, Mexican politician (b. 1950)

2000 onwards

- 2002 - Eileen Farrell, American soprano (b. 1920)
- Ben Hollioake, English cricketer (b. 1977)
- 2003 - Fritz Spiegl, Austrian-born journalist (b. 1926)
- 2004 - Rupert Hamer, Australian politician (b. 1916)

Holidays and observances

- Roman Empire - The fifth and final day of Quinquatria, held in honor of Minerva.
- Roman Empire - Tubilustrium was held in honor of Mars
- Ancient Latvia - Lieldienas held in honor of Mara and other goddesses
- Pakistan - National Day (Republic Day)
- Otago, New Zealand - Anniversary Day

External links

- [http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/march/23 BBC: On This Day]
- [http://www.tnl.net/when/3/23 Today in History: March 23] ---- March 22 - March 24 - February 23 - April 23 -- listing of all days ko:3월 23일 ms:23 Mac ja:3月23日 simple:March 23 th:23 มีนาคม

Folk music

Folk music, in the original sense of the term, is music by and of the people. Folk music arose, and best survives, in societies not yet affected by mass communication and the commercialization of culture. It normally was shared and performed by the entire community (not by a special class of expert performers), and was transmitted by word of mouth. During the 20th and 21st century, the term folk music took on a second meaning: it describes a particular kind of popular music which is culturally descended from or otherwise influenced by traditional folk music. Like other popular music, this kind of folk music is most often performed by experts and is transmitted in organized performances and commercially distributed recordings. However, popular music has filled some of the roles and purposes of the folk music it has replaced. Folk music is more or less synonymous with traditional music. Some would use either term with a more specific meaning, restricted to just popularized-folk/traditional music or just not-popularized; however, both terms are used interchangeably among the general population and are not strictly defined. See also: World music.

Defining folk music

World music "Folk music is usually seen as the authentic expression of a way of life now, past or about to disappear (or in some cases, to be preserved or somehow revived). Unfortunately, despite the assembly of an enormous body of work over some two centuries, there is still no unanimity on what folk music (or folklore, or the folk) is." (Middleton 1990, p.127) Gene Shay, co-founder and host of the Philadelphia Folk Festival, defined folk music in an April 2003 interview by saying: "In the strictest sense, it's music that is rarely written for profit. It's music that has endured and been passed down by oral tradition. [...] And folk music is participatory—you don't have to be a great musician to be a folk singer. [...] And finally, it brings a sense of community. It's the people's music." The English term folk, which gained usage in the 18th century (during the Romantic period) to refer to peasants or non-literate peoples, is related to the German word Volk (meaning people or nation). The term is used to emphasize that folk music emerges spontaneously from communities of ordinary people. "As the complexity of social stratification and interaction became clearer and increased, various conditioning criteria, such as 'continuity', 'tradition', 'oral transmission', 'anonymity' and uncommercial origins, became more important than simple social categories themselves." Charles Seeger (1980) describes three contemporary defining criteria of folk music (Middleton 1990, p.127-8): # A "schema comprising four musical types: 'primitive' or 'tribal'; 'elite' or 'art'; 'folk'; and 'popular'. Usually...folk music is associated with a lower class in societies which are culturally and socially stratified, that is, which have developed an elite, and possibly also a popular, musical culture." Cecil Sharp (1972), A.L. Lloyd (). # "Cultural processes rather than abstract musical types...continuity and oral transmission...seen as characterizing one side of a cultural dichotomy, the other side of which is found not only in the lower layers of feudal, capitalist and some oriental societies but also in 'primitive' societies and in parts of 'popular cultures'." Redfield (1947) and Dundes (1965). # Less prominent, "a rejection of rigid boundaries, preferring a conception, simply of varying practice within one field, that of 'music'." David Harker (1985) argues that "folk music" is, in Peter van der Merwe's words, "a meaningless term invented by 'bourgeois' commentators". Jazz musician Louis Armstrong and blues musician Big Bill Broonzy have both been attributed the remark "All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song."

Subjects of folk music

Apart from instrumental music that forms a part of folk music, especially dance music traditions, much folk music is vocal music, since the instrument that makes such music is usually handy. As such, most folk music has lyrics, and is about something. Narrative verse looms large in the folk music of many cultures. This encompasses such forms as traditional epic poetry, much of which was meant originally for oral performance, sometimes accompanied by instruments. Many epic poems of various cultures were pieced together from shorter pieces of traditional narrative verse, which explains their episodic structure and often their in medias res plot developments. Other forms of traditional narrative verse relate the outcomes of battles and other tragedies or natural disasters. Sometimes, as in the triumphant Song of Deborah found in the Biblical Book of Judges, these songs celebrate victory. Laments for lost battles and wars, and the lives lost in them, are equally prominent in many folk traditions; these laments keep alive the cause for which the battle was fought. The narratives of folk songs often also remember folk heroes such as John Henry to Robin Hood. Some folk song narratives recall supernatural events or mysterious deaths. Hymns and other forms of religious music are often of traditional and unknown origin. Western musical notation was originally created to preserve the lines of Gregorian chant, which before its invention was taught as an oral tradition in monastic communities. Folk songs such as Green grow the rushes, O present religious lore in a mnemonic form. In the Western world, Christmas carols and other traditional songs preserve religious lore in song form. Other sorts of folk songs are less exalted. Work songs are composed; they frequently feature call and response structures, and are designed to enable the labourers who sing them to coordinate their efforts in accordance with the rhythms of the songs. In the armed forces, a lively tradition of jody calls are sung while soldiers are on the march. Professional sailors made use of a large body of sea shanties. Love poetry, often of a tragic or regretful nature, prominently figures in many folk traditions. Nursery rhymes and nonsense verse also are frequent subjects of folk songs.

Variation in folk music

Music transmitted by word of mouth though a community will, in time, develop many variants, because this kind of transmission cannot produce word-for-word and note-for-note accuracy. Indeed, many traditional folk singers are quite creative and deliberately modify the material they learn. Because variants proliferate naturally, it is naïve to believe that there is such a thing as the "authentic" version of a ballad such as "Barbara Allen." Field researchers in folk song (see below) have encountered countless versions of this ballad throughout the English-speaking world, and these versions often differ greatly from each other. None can reliably claim to be the original, and it is quite possible that whatever the "original" was, it ceased to be sung centuries ago. Any version can lay an equal claim to authenticity, so long as it is truly from a traditional folksinging community and not the work of an outside editor. Cecil Sharp had an influential idea about the process of folk variation: he felt that the competing variants of a folk song would undergo a process akin to biological natural selection: only those new variants that were the most appealing to ordinary singers would be picked up by others and transmitted onward in time. Thus, over time we would expect each folksong to become esthetically ever more appealing — it would be collectively composed to perfection, as it were, by the community. On the other hand, there is also evidence to support the view that transmission of folk songs can be rather sloppy. Occasionally, collected folk song versions include material or verses incorporated from different songs that makes little sense in its context. A perfect process of natural selection would not have permitted these incoherent versions to survive.

The decline of folk traditions in modern societies

Folk music seems to reflect a universal impulse of humanity. No fieldwork expedition by cultural anthropologists has yet discovered a preindustrial people that did not have its own folk music. It seems safe to infer that folk music was a property of all people starting from the dawn of the species. However, the development of modern society--first literacy, then the conversion of culture into a salable commodity--created a new form of transmission of music that first influenced, then in some societies essentially eliminated the original folk tradition. The decline of folk music in a culture can be followed through three stages.

Stage I: Urban influence

One of the first folk traditions impacted by modern society was the folksong of rural England. Starting in Elizabethan times, urban poets wrote broadsheet ballads that (thanks to printing) could be sold widely. The ballads probably didn't need musical notation, since they would have been sung to tunes that everybody knew, the folk tradition being very much alive at the time. These ballads heavily influenced the folk tradition, but did not override it. In fact, the folk tradition showed great resilience. Through the process of folk transmission, the urban ballads were modified, keeping the more vivid content and ironing out the less "citified" material. The resulting body of folk lyrics is widely considered to be a very appealing blend. Thus, the printing press and widespread literacy did not suffice to destroy the English folk tradition, but in some ways enriched it. The English folk song legacy was probably affected by urban melodies as well as words. The clue here is that folk music in remote rural areas of the English-speaking world, such as Highland Scotland or the Appalachian mountains, abounds in tunes that employ the pentatonic scale, a scale widely used for folk music around the world. However, pentatonic music was rare among the rural English villagers who first volunteered their tunes to researchers in the late 19th century. A plausible explanation is that life in rural England was far more closely affected by the proximity to the urban centers. Music in the standard major and minor scales evidently penetrated to the nearby rural areas, where it was converted to folk idiom, but nevertheless succeeded in displacing the old pentatonic music.

Stage II: Replacement of folk music by popular music

The pattern of urban influence on folk music was intensified to outright destruction as soon as the capitalist economic system had developed to the point that music could be packaged and distributed for the purpose of earning a profit--in other words, when popular music was born. It was around Victorian times that ordinary people of the Western world were first offered music as a mass commodity, for example, in the phenomenon of Music Hall. The introduction of popular music was simultaneous with the latter part of the Industrial Revolution. This was a time of great change in lifestyle for the great body of the people, notably the migration of the old agrarian communities to the new industrial ones. It is likely that the resulting social disruption helped cut people's emotional bonds to their old folk music, and thereby helped the shift in taste toward popular music. As technology advanced, succeeding generations became enticed with popular music in ever more accessible and desirable forms. Gramophone records became LPs and then CDs; the Music Hall gave way to radio, followed by television. With the ever-increasing success of popular music, the musical life of many individuals eventually ceased to include any folk music at all. Moreover, since popular music for most people is passive music (that is, listened to, but not created or performed), the overwhelming success of popular music also entailed a sharp decline of music as an active, participatory activity.

Stage III: Loss of musical ability in the community

The terminal state of the loss of folk music can be seen in the United States and a few similar societies, where except in isolated areas and among hobbyists, traditional folk music no longer survives. In the absence of folk music, many individuals do not sing. It is possible that non-singers feel intimidated by widespread exposure in recordings and broadcasting to the singing of skilled experts. Another possibility is that they simply cannot sing, because they did not sing when they were small children, when learning of skills takes place most naturally. Certainly it is very common for contemporary Americans to claim that they cannot sing. There is anecdotal evidence that the loss of singing ability is continuing rapidly at the present time. As recently as the 1960s, audiences at American sporting events collectively sang the American national anthem before a game; the anthem is now generally assigned to a recording or to a soloist. Inability to sing is apparently unusual in a traditional society, where the habit of singing folk song since early childhood gives everyone the practice needed to able to sing at least reasonably well.

Regional variation

The loss of folk music is occurring at different rates in different regions of the world. Naturally, where industrialization and commercialization of culture are most advanced, so tends to be the loss of folk music. Yet in nations or regions where folk music is a badge of cultural or national identity, the loss of folk music can be slowed; this is held to be true, for instance in the case of Hungary, Ireland, Brittany, and Galicia, Greece and Crete all of which retain their traditional music to some degree.

Fieldwork and scholarship on folk music

Starting in the 19th century, interested people - academics and amateur scholars - started to take note of what was being lost, and there grew various efforts aimed at preserving the music of the people. One such effort was the collection by Francis James Child in the late 19th century of the texts of over three hundred ballads in the English and Scots traditions (called the Child Ballads). Contemporaneously came the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, and later and more significantly Cecil Sharp who worked in the early 20th century to preserve a great body of English rural folk song, music and dance, under the aegis of what became and remains the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS). Sharp also worked in America, recording the folk songs of the Appalachian Mountains in 1916-1918 in collaboration with Maud Karpeles and Olive Dame Campbell. Around this time, composers of classical music developed a strong interest in folk song collecting, and a number of outstanding composers carried out their own field work on folk song. These included Ralph Vaughan Williams in England and Béla Bartók in Hungary. These composers, like many of their predecessors, incorporated folk material into their classical compositions. In America, during the 1930s and 1940s, the Library of Congress worked through the offices of musicologist Alan Lomax and others to capture as much American field material as possible. Often, fieldworkers in folk song hoped that their work would restore folk music to the people. For instance, Cecil Sharp campaigned, with some success, to have English folk songs (in his own heavily edited and expurgated versions) to be taught to schoolchildren. One theme that runs through the great period of scholarly folk song collection is the tendency of certain members of the "folk", who were supposed to be the object of study, to become scholars and advocates themselves. For example, Jean Ritchie was the youngest child of a large family from Viper, Kentucky that had preserved many of the old Appalachian folk songs. Ritchie, living in a time when the Appalachians had opened up to outside influence, was university educated and ultimately moved to New York City, where she made a number of classic recordings of the family repertoire and published an important compilation of these songs.

Folk revivals

As folk traditions decline, there is often a conscious effort to resuscitate them. Such efforts are often exerted by bridge figures such as Jean Ritchie, described above. Folk revivals also involve collaboration between traditional folk musicians and other participants (often of urban background) who come to the tradition as adults. The folk revival of the 1950's in Britain and America had something of this character. In 1950 Alan Lomax came to Britain, where at a Working Men's Club in the remote Northumberland mining village of Tow Law he met two other seminal figures: A.L.'Bert' Lloyd and Ewan MacColl, who were performing folk music to the locals there. Lloyd was a colourful figure who had travelled the world and worked at such varied occupations as sheep-shearer in Australia and shanty-man on a whaling ship. MacColl, born in Salford of Scottish parents, was a brilliant playwright and songwriter who had been strongly politicised by his earlier life. MacColl had also learned a large body of Scottish traditional songs from his mother. The meeting of MacColl and Lloyd with Lomax is credited with being the point at which the British roots revival began. The two colleagues went back to London where they formed the Ballads and Blues Club which eventually became renamed the Singers' Club and was the first, as well as the most enduring, of what became known as folk clubs. As the 1950s progressed into the 1960s, the folk revival movement built up in both Britain and America. Another example is the Hungarian model, the tanchaz movement. This model involves strong cooperation between musicology experts and enthusiastic amateurs, resulting in a strong vocational foundation and a very high professional level. They also had the advantage that rich, living traditions of Hungarian folk music and folk culture still survived in rural areas, especially in Transylvania. The involvement of experts meant an effort to understand and revive folk traditions in their full complexity. Music, dance, and costumes remained together as they once had been in the rural communities: rather than merely reviving folk music, the movement revived broader folk traditions. Started in the 1970s, tanchaz soon became a massive movement creating an alternative leisure activity for youths apart from discos and music clubs—or one could say that it created a new kind of music club. The tanchaz movement spread to ethnic Hungarian communities around the world. Today, almost every major city in the U.S. and Australia has its own Hungarian folk music and folk dance group; there are also groups in Japan, Hong Kong, Argentina and Western Europe. See also: blues, Harry Everett Smith.

The emergence of popular folk artists

During the twentieth century, a crucial change in the history of folk music began. Folk material came to be adopted by talented performers, performed by them in concerts, and disseminated by recordings and broadcasting. In other words, a new genre of popular music had arisen. This genre was linked by nostalgia and imitation to the original traditions of folk music as it was sung by ordinary people. However, as a popular genre it quickly evolved to be quite different from its original roots. Confusingly, popular (i.e., commercially-disseminated) music based on a folk tradition is called "folk music", no matter how different it may be from a folk music rooted in the community. As a result, some individuals in a modern society are unaware that folk music of the original variety ever existed. The rise of folk music as a popular genre began with performers whose own lives were rooted in the authentic folk tradition. Thus, for example, Woody Guthrie began by singing songs he remembered his mother singing to him as a child. Later, in the 1930s and 1940s, Guthrie both collected folk music and also composed his own songs, as did Pete Seeger, who was the son of a professional musicologist. Through dissemination on commercial recordings, this vein of music became popular in the United States during the 1950s, through singers like the Weavers (Seeger's group), Burl Ives, Harry Belafonte and the Kingston Trio, who tried to reproduce and honor the work that had been collected in preceding decades. The commercial popularity of such performers probably peaked in the U.S. with the ABC Hootenanny [http://www.tvtome.com/Hootenanny/] television series in 1963, which was cancelled after the arrival of the Beatles, the "British invasion" and the rise of folk-rock. The itinerant folksinger lifestyle was exemplified by Ramblin' Jack Elliott, a disciple of Woody Guthrie who in turn influenced Bob Dylan. Sometimes these performers would locate scholarly work in libraries and revive the songs in their recordings, for example in Joan Baez's rendition of "Henry Martin," which adds a guitar accompaniment to a version collected and edited by Cecil Sharp. Publications like Sing Out! [http://singout.org/] magazine helped spread both traditional and composed songs, as did folk-revival-oriented record companies. Many of this group of popular folk singers maintained an idealistic, leftist/progressive political orientation. This is perhaps not surprising. Folk music is easily identified with the ordinary working people who created it, and preserving treasured things against the claimed relentless encroachments of capitalism is likewise a goal of many politically progressive people. Thus, in the 1960s such singers as Joan Baez, Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan followed in Guthrie's footsteps and to begin writing "protest music" and topical songs, particularly against the Vietnam War, and likewise expressed in song their support for the civil rights movement. Such songs were newly written, but took their instrumentation and stanza forms from folk tradition. In Ireland, The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem (although the members were all Irish born, the group became famous while based in New York's Greenwich Village, it must be noted), The Dubliners, Clannad, Planxty, The Chieftains, The Pogues and a variety of other folk bands have done much over recent years to revitalise and repopularise Irish traditional music. These bands were rooted, to a greater or lesser extent, in a living tradition of Irish music, and they benefitted from collection efforts on the part of the likes of Seamus Ennis and Peter Kennedy, among others. In Hungary, the group Muzsikás and the singer Márta Sebestyén became known throughout the world due to their numerous American tours and their participation in the Hollywood movie The English Patient and Sebestyén's work with the Deep Forest band.

The blending of folk and popular genres

The experience of the last century suggests that as soon as a folk tradition comes to be marketed as popular music, its musical content will quickly be modified to become more like popular music. Such modified folk music often incorporates electric guitars, drum kit, or forms of rhythmic syncopation that are characteristic of popular music but were absent in the original. One example of this sort is contemporary country music, which descends ultimately from a rural American folk tradition, but has evolved to become vastly different from its original model. Rap music evolved from an African-American inner-city folk tradition, but is likewise very different nowadays from its folk original. A third example is contemporary bluegrass, which is a modified development of American old time music. As less traditional forms of folk music gain popularity, one often observes tension between so-called "purists" or "traditionalists" and the innovators. For example, traditionalists were indignant when Bob Dylan began to use an electric guitar. His electrified performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival was to prove to be an early focal point for this controversy. Sometimes, however, the exponents of amplified music were bands such as Fairport Convention, Pentangle, Mr. Fox and Steeleye Span who saw the electrification of traditional musical forms as a means to reach a far wider audience, and their efforts have been largely recognised for what they were by even some of the most die-hard of purists. Traditional folk music forms also merged with rock and roll to form the hybrid generally known as folk rock which evolved through performers such as The Byrds, Simon and Garfunkel, The Mamas and the Papas, and many others. Since the 1970s a genre of "contemporary folk", fuelled by new singer-songwriters, has continued to make the coffee-house circuit and keep the tradition of acoustic non-classical music alive in the United States. Such artists include Steve Goodman, John Prine, Cheryl Wheeler, Bill Morrisey, Christine Lavin and Gundula Krause. Lavin in particular has become prominent as a leading promoter of this musical genre in recent years. Some, such as Lavin and Wheeler, inject a great deal of humor in their songs and performances, although much of their music is also deeply personal and sometimes satirical. In the 1980s a group of artists like Phranc and The Knitters propagated a form of folk music also called country punk or folk punk, which eventually evolved into Alt country. More recently the same spirit has been embraced and expanded on by performers such as Dave Alvin, Ani DiFranco, and Steve Earle. At the same time, a line of singers from Baez to Phil Ochs have continued to use traditional forms for original material. The appropriation of folk has even continued into hard rock and heavy metal, with bands such as Skyclad, Waylander and Finntroll melding distinctive elements of folk styles from a wide variety of traditions, including in many cases traditional instruments such as fiddles, tin whistles and bagpipes as an element of their sound. Unlike other folk-related genres, folk metal shies away from organized religion in favour of more ancient pagan inspired themes. A similar stylistic shift, without using the "folk music" name, has occurred with the phenomenon of Celtic music, which in many cases is based on an amalgamation of Irish traditional music, Scottish traditional music, and other traditional musics associated with lands in which Celtic languages are or were spoken (regardless of any significant research showing that the musics have any genuine genetic relationship; so Breton music and Galician music are often included in the genre). One of the more unusual offshoots of modern folk music is the genre now known as filk, a form of music defined primarily by who its audience is. Folk music is still extremely popular among some audiences today, with folk music clubs meeting to share traditional-style songs, and there are major folk music festivals in many countries, eg the Port Fairy Folk Festival is a major annual event in Australia attracting top international folk performers as well as many local artists. The Cambridge Folk Festival in Cambridge, England is always sold out within days, and is noted for having a very wide definition of who can be invited as folk musicians. The "club tents" allow attendees to discover large numbers of unknown artists, who, for ten or fifteen minutes each, present their work to the festival audience.

Pastiche and parody

Popular culture sometimes creates pastiches of folk music for its own ends. One famous example is the pseudo-ballad sung about brave Sir Robin in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Enthusiasts for folk music might properly consider this song to be pastiche and not parody, because the tune is pleasant and far from inept, and the topic being lampooned is not balladry but the medieval heroic tradition. The arch-shaped melodic form of this song (first and last lines low in pitch, middle lines high) is characteristic of traditional English folk music. A more recent similarly incisive send-up of folk music, this time American in origin, is the film A Mighty Wind by Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy. Another instance of pastiche is the notoriously well-known theme song for the television show Gilligan's Island (music by George Wyle, lyrics by Sherwood Schwartz). This tune is also folk-like in character, and in fact is written in a traditional folk mode (modes are a type of musical scale); the mode of "Gilligan's Island" is ambiguous between Dorian and Aeolian. The lyrics begin with the traditional folk device in which the singer invites his hearers to listen to the tale that follows. Moreover, two of the stanzas repeat the final short line, a common device in English folk stanzas. However, the raising of the key by a semitone with each new verse is an unmistakable trait of commercial music and never occurred in the original folk tradition. Folk music is easy to parody because it is, at present, a popular music genre that relies on a traditional music genre. As such, it is likely to lack the sophistication and glamour that attach to other forms of popular music. Folk music satire ranges from the worst excesses of Rambling Syd Rumpo and Bill Oddie to the deft and subtle artistry of Sid Kipper, Eric Idle and Tom Lehrer. Even "serious" folk musicians are not averse to poking fun at the form from time to time, for example Martin Carthy's devastating rendition of "All the Hard Cheese of Old England" (written by Les Barker), to the tune of "All the Hard Times of Old England", Robb Johnson's "Lack of Jolly Ploughboy," and more recently "I'm Sending an E-mail to Santa" by the Yorkshire-based harmony group Artisan. Other musicians have been known to take the tune of a traditional folk song and add their own words, often humourous, or on a similar-sounding yet different subject; these include The Wurzels and The Incredible Dr. Busker. Filk music is a closely related musical genre which originated as parodies of folk songs, and parody remains a dominant theme of the style. It is evolving into a true folk tradition, however, with songs learned orally that are undergoing the "folk process" of change in melody and text.

Media

External links

Folksong material:
- [http://www.mudcat.org/ mudcat.org], the home of the Digital Traditions (DIGITRAD) folksong database. The latest (2002) edition of DIGITRAD contains lyrics, and in some cases tunes or chords, for around 9000 folk rock, folk revival, and authentic American, English, and Irish folk songs, as well as some parodies. The database may be searched online, or downloaded as a standalone application. Another portal to DIGITRAD with file formats converted to emerging standards (e.g. ABC) is available at http://sniff.numachi.com/~rickheit/dtrad/.
- [http://www.csufresno.edu/folklore/BalladSearch.html The Traditional Ballad Index] search page. Provides bibliographic information and some theoretical genealogical information for many ballads in English.
- [http://www.travel-impressions.de/music/dichosa.htm Photos of Regional and Cultural Genres of Music and Dance]
- http://www.smsu.edu/folksong/maxhunter/. The Max Hunter Folk Song Collection is a set of about 1600 field recordings made by Max Hunter between 1956 and 1976 in the Ozark Mountain region of Missouri. The recordings are downloadable.
- [http://www.birchmore.clara.net/ Northumbrian Traditional Music] The folk music of Northumbria in North-East England.
- The [http://mtcn.free.fr folk music in the county of Nice] (France) : hundreds of MIDI files, lyrics, music sheets.
- http://ingeb.org. A list of folksongs from all over the world
- http://www.volksmusiknet.ch/. Swiss Folkmusic
- Musipedia contains several thousand folk music tunes. [http://www.musipedia.org musipedia.org]
- http://www.tritonus.ch/. Swiss Folkmusic and -instruments
- [http://www.geocities.com/krofnic/index1.htm Pticice] - a free MP3 album of native Serbian music
- http://folktunes.org/. The Folktunes Wiki, with streaming and downloadable songs, lyrics, and all things folk. In its infancy.
- [http://www.folkalley.com FolkAlley.com] - 24-hour streaming folk music
- [http://www.folkandroots.co.uk Folk and Roots]- A guide to the folk scene in the UK
- [http://www.floridamemory.com/Collections/folklife/folklife_cd.cfm Music from the Florida Folklife Collection] - From Shove It Over, a WPA recording of a work song performed by Zora Neale Hurston, to Orange Blossom Special, performed by Gamble Rogers and Will McLean, this CD spans fifty years of Florida folk music. The recordings are downloadable.
- [http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/WiscFolkSong Wisconsin Folksong Collection, 1937-1946]. Presented by the [http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/ University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center] and [http://music.library.wisc.edu/ Mills Music Library Special Collections]. The Wisconsin Folksong Collection, 1937-1946 contains Wisconsin field recordings, notes, and photographs made by UW-Madison faculty member Helene Stratman-Thomas as part of the Wisconsin Folk Music Recording Project, co-sponsored by the University of Wisconsin and the Library of Congress during the summers of 1940, 1941, and 1946; and recordings collected by song catcher Sidney Robertson Cowell during the summer of 1937 for the Special Skills Division of the Resettlement Administration. Folk Festivals:
- [http://www.folkdranouter.be Folkfestival Dranouter:] An annual folk festival in Belgium, attracting over 70 000 visitors, which combines traditional with contemporary music. History:
- [http://libcom.org/history/articles/revolutionary-song-france People's history: Political folk song in France, 1789-1989]
- [http://libcom.org/history/articles/revolutionary-song-italy People's history: Political song in Italy, 1862-1999] Pastiche and parody:
- [http://arago4.tn.utwente.nl/stonedead/movies/holy-grail/scene-10.html A web page on "The Ballad of Sir Robin", with lyrics and sound file]
- Gilligan's Island theme:
- [http://www.gilligansisle.com/wave.html Sound files]
- [http://www.geocities.com/rickanddarvagossip/gilliganthemesong.html Lyrics: one of many sites ]

References

- English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. Collected by Cecil J. Sharp. Ed. Maud Karpeles. 1932. London. Oxford University Press.
- Carson, Ciaran (1997). Last Night's Fun: In and Out of Time with Irish Music. North Point Press.
- Harker, David (1985). Fakesong: The Manufacture of British 'Folksong', 1700 to the Present Day. Cited in van der Merwe (1989).
- Karpeles, Maud. An Introduction to English Folk Song. 1973. Oxford. Oxford University Press.
- Middleton, Richard (1990/2002). Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN 0335152759.
- Seeger, Charles (1980). Cited in Middleton (2002)
- Sharp, Cecil. Folk Song: Some Conclusions. 1907. Charles River Books
- van der Merwe, Peter (1989). Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0193161214. Category:Folk music Category:Folklore ja:フォークソング

Songwriter

A songwriter is someone who writes the lyrics to songs, the musical composition or melody to songs, or both. That is to say, a songwriter is a lyricist, a composer, or both. The word 'songwriter' is however more commonly used to describe one who writes popular songs than to describe a writer of art songs.

History and background of songwriters

Songwriters may perform the songs they write themselves, or may write for somebody else to perform. People who sing their own songs are nowadays typically called singer-songwriters, although the tradition of doing this dates back hundreds of years. It is often speculated that pre-historic man must have made up and sung songs. More recently, the troubadours of the middle ages sang their own work, as did the German Minnesingers. Most art songwriting is written for somebody other than the composer to perform, although it is known that Schubert often sang his own songs at private parties, and there have been a number of composers who were also singers and wrote for themselves, Carl Loewe being one example. Many modern rock and roll bands have one or two songwriters, usually members of the band. In many cases, the lead singer is one of the songwriters. There have been quite a few popular songwriting teams such as the Tamla Motown team of Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Eddie Holland and the teams of Townshend and Entwistle, Lennon and McCartney, Lerner and Loewe, George and Ira Gershwin, Jagger and Richards and Rodgers and Hart. Many songwriters also serve as their own music publishers, while others have outside publishers. Legally, songs are considered intellectual property, and song copyrights can be bought, sold, or otherwise exchanged. Songwriting and publishing royalties can be a substantial source of income, particularly if a song becomes a hit record.

External links

- [http://www.songwritersguild.com/ Songwriters Guild of America]
- [http://www.hodgson-law.com/a-reference-center.php Music industry Reference Center for Songwriters] This site provides plain english explanations of terms and concepts related to the needs of songwriters.
- [http://www.hodgson-law.com/ Hodgson Law Group legal advice for the recording artist] We provide plain english advice of the terms and concepts related to the needs of songwriters and publishing agreements.
- [http://www.copyright.gov/records/cohm.html Searching song copyright holder information on US Copyright office website] Category:Occupations in music

Television

: Television is a telecommunication system for broadcasting and receiving moving pictures and sound over a distance. The term has come to refer to all the aspects of television programming and transmission as well. programming ]]

History

The development of television technology can be partitioned along two lines: those developments that depended upon both mechanical and electronic principles, and those which are purely electronic. From the latter descended all modern televisions, but these would not have been possible without discoveries and insights from the mechanical systems. The word television is a hybrid word, created from both Greek and Latin. Tele- is Greek for "far", while -vision is from the Latin visio, meaning "vision" or "sight". It is often abbreviated as TV or the telly.

Electromechanical television

The German student Paul Gottlieb Nipkow proposed and patented the first electromechanical television system in 1885. Nipkow's spinning disk design is credited with being the first television image rasterizer. However, it wasn't until 1907 that developments in amplification tube technology made the design practical. Meanwhile, Constantin Perskyi had coined the word television in a paper read to the International Electricity Congress at the International World Fair in Paris on August 25, 1900. Perskeyi's paper reviewed the existing electromechanical technologies, mentioning the work of Nipkow and others. 1900 In 1911, Boris Rosing and his student Vladimir Kosma Zworykin achieved a television system that used a mechanical mirror-drum scanner to transmit, in Zworykin's words, "very crude images" over wires to the electronic Braun tube (cathode ray tube) in the receiver. Moving images were not possible because, in the scanner, "the sensitivity was not enough and the selenium cell was very laggy." Zworykin later went to work for RCA to build a purely electronic television, the design of which was eventually found to violate patents by Philo Taylor Farnsworth. On March 25, 1925, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird gave a demonstration of televised silhouette images at Selfridge's Department Store in London. But if television is defined as the transmission of live, moving, half-tone (grayscale) images, and not silhouette or still images, Baird achieved this privately on October 2, 1925, and gave the world's first public demonstration of a working television system to members of the Royal Institution and a newspaper reporter on January 26, 1926 at his laboratory in London. Unlike later electronic systems with several hundred lines of resolution, Baird's vertically scanned image, using a scanning disc embedded with a double spiral of lenses, had only 30 lines, just enough to reproduce a recognizable human face. In 1928 Baird's company (Baird Television Development Company / Cinema Television) broadcast the first transatlantic television signal, between London and New York, and the first shore to ship transmission. He also demonstrated an electromechanical colour, infrared (dubbed "Noctovision"), and stereoscopic television, using additional lenses, disks and filters. In parallel he developed a video disk recording system dubbed "Phonovision"; a number of the Phonovision[http://www.tvdawn.com/tvimage.htm] recordings, dating back to